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unsafe release's avatar

Happy Independence Day from this Canadian dude! Enjoy!

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Ronnie Schreiber's avatar

They used to call the Hudson's sponsored fireworks on the Detroit River as part of the "International Freedom Festival" celebrating both Independance Day and Dominion Day. It just occurred to me that renaming Dominion Day to "Canada Day" (which sounds lame, no offense intended) in 1982 was one of the earliest symptoms of suicidal empathy. How dare you take pride at dominion over one of the largest land masses in the world.

My personal land acknowledgement:

I live on land formerly occupied by the Odawa, well, at least it was unless the Hurons had driven them off.

Most of the tribes were martial, warrior societies who waged war on each other long before the first Europeans arrived.

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unsafe release's avatar

I love the personal land acknowledgment, that’s great!

BTW, I completely agree with your warrior societies statement. Every nation, group, or tribe that exists today was founded on conquering other nations, groups, or tribes.

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sgeffe's avatar

Is there still a “Dominion” grocery chain there? I seem to remember it from listening to CKLW in the 1970s. (Dick Purtain, Ronnie! IYKYK!)

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Ronnie Schreiber's avatar

My friend Steve Cohen used to write jokes for Dick Purtan when he was still in high school. To keep things off the books they'd freebie him tickets to Pine Knob.

I'm not familiar with a Dominion grocery chain but I don't spend a lot of time on that side of the river.

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sgeffe's avatar

When Dick moved back across the river to WCZY, my Dad stood in line at whatever Micky Shorr was doing the “Nobody Should Be Without Dick Purtain For A Day” promo which was an FM converter installed in his 1980 Cutlass company car!

My Dad ordered a Delco AM/FM stereo in his next company car, a 1983 Regal, a couple years later. First one in a car for our family, and what a revelation!

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Ronnie Schreiber's avatar

There's some really nasty stuff in the history of FM. David Sarnoff at RCA pretty much drove Edwin Armstrong, the inventor of FM, to suicide. Sarnoff saw FM as a threat to RCA's dominance of AM which was the company's financial foundation as they developed broadcast television, which Sarnoff correctly saw as the future. RCA successfully lobbied the FCC to change the FM band, making Armstrong's receivers useless and they also infringed on his patents for the audio side of TV broadcasts and fought him in court, only paying his wife royalties after his death.

I think the first FM radio I used in a car was when my older brother bought an FM adapter for his 8 track unit (might have been a 4 track even).

When I started driving the hand me down '66 Impala, I made a custom bezel out of 1/4" plywood to mount a stereo in the dash and put some cheap wedge speakers on the back deck. Even bad audio is better than no music at all. Caveat: I cannot listen to WCSX for more than a few seconds because their signal is so compressed so they can sound louder that recordings are almost unrecognizable.

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unsafe release's avatar

I’ve never seen one, but I’m on the Wet Coast so it’s possible that they didn’t have them out here.

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